In Europe between the World Wars, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of the era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Ernst Jäckh, the ebullient director of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German School of Politics, or DHfP), perhaps best represented this complex collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. In a series of lectures held at the Geneva School of International Studies in July 1926, Jäckh argued that the First World War had been a break in world history and the beginning of a new universalism, which was rooted in the world's new economic and political interdependence. Significantly, he clarified, “This new universalism acknowledges the individuality of the nation, but at the same time understands the community of a family of nations.”Footnote 1 For geographical, political, and commercial reasons, Jäckh viewed Germany as the embodiment of this new, interdependent world and a symbol of a “joint European destiny.”Footnote 2
The perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in Jäckh's speech highlights a key characteristic of liberal internationalism in interwar Germany. The German liberal movement was deeply entangled with nationalist thought, and Jäckh himself had been the spokesperson of ambiguous liberal imperialistic projects.Footnote 3 National goals were embedded in the awareness of international entanglements, and nationalism and internationalism could not be clearly separated but rather were mutually supportive. Jäckh not only was one of the leading promulgators of the New Germany ideology internationally, but also made this combination of national internationalism the purpose of many of his endeavors. The emphasis on the “New Germany” allowed political and intellectual elites to distinguish between the new, democratic German state and Imperial Germany, and served as a rhetorical tool to advocate for Germany’s reintegration in the international community. This article traces the genealogy of Jäckh's internationalism, details how this national internationalism was pursued in practice during the 1920s, and how it evolved in transnational settings in the early 1930s.
This study aligns with historians’ growing interest in the international and transnational. The move beyond the centrality of the state and the nation, which had been at the center of the social scientific enquiry since the early 1980s, has warranted scholars to speak of a historiographical turn, whether under the aegis of transnational, international, or global history.Footnote 4 This focus on internationalism has led to an interest in the actors of internationalism, both individual and organizational, with a growing attention to transnational associations and the transmission of associational logics across national borders, which in turn opened opportunities for conceptual connections with global civil society and cosmopolitanism.Footnote 5 Scholarship in this area has developed along somewhat parallel tracks, focusing on either the progressive, liberal, and cooperative character of internationalism or the internationalist projects of fascist and communist states.Footnote 6 Glenda Sluga has warned, however, against the juxtaposition created by this approach and shown how internationalism and nationalism coexisted.Footnote 7 By tracing this coexistence in a variety of associational endeavors, Jäckh's case shows how his national internationalism became a space where liberal internationalism interacted with the dark sides of internationalism. This case points to the malleability of liberal internationalism. By allowing for common ground with National Socialism in the hope of influencing Nazi policies, it risked being coopted by the regime's internationalist strategies.
Over the past twenty years, historians have started placing Germany in a broader international and transnational context. For a long time, the cross-national element has found its way into histories of Germany through an attention to comparative research and processes of Americanization.Footnote 8 Only recently have historians emphasized the importance of placing the history of Germany in a transnational context, clarifying the methodological difference between transnational history, comparative history, and histories of transatlantic transfers.Footnote 9 Historians have analyzed various aspects of German history through the lenses of internationalism and transnationalism, by focusing on either specific time periods, such as the German colonial experience or the Cold War, or social processes, such as philanthropy or student activism.Footnote 10
Scholars have been relatively late in placing Jäckh in a clear international and transnational context. Historians and political scientists have viewed Jäckh through the interpretative lens of the German School of Politics against the background of the National Socialist seizure of power.Footnote 11 The dominance of the nationalist frame of reference emerges in the attention to Jäckh's compromises with, and adaptations to, National Socialism.Footnote 12 Only recently have historians analyzed Jäckh's internationalism, primarily in the context of broader investigations of the DHfP within transatlantic philanthropic networks. Influenced by the pioneering work of Giuliana Gemelli, these studies have shown how the impact of US philanthropy in Europe was complicated by the ways local actors and structural conditions shaped the reception and adaptation of American ideals, models, and institutions.Footnote 13 In this context, Jäckh is seen as an example of local actors’ ability to shape and influence the activities of US foundations, rather than being passive recipients, and as one of multiple individual and organizational actors that formed the basis of a semiofficial cultural diplomacy in the interwar years.Footnote 14
The turn toward internationalism and transnationalism, however, offers a broader interpretative framework to analyze Jäckh beyond the emphasis on philanthropic networks. In this essay, Jäckh serves as a vantage point for understanding conceptions of internationalism in a time of rapidly changing global relations and norms. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, Jäckh's internationalism evolved from an enthusiasm for the League of Nations, which he viewed as a tool to reintegrate Germany into the world system and revise the Treaty of Versailles, to a confidence that an interdependent world would exercise a normalizing force on individual states. At the same time, interdependence would require Germany's reintegration into an interconnected system because the balance of the European order rested for geographical and economic reasons on Germany. From the Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund to the New Commonwealth Society, Jäckh's internationalism rested on both institutional infrastructures and the developing of an internationalist mentality. Both structures and ideology served Germany's reintegration into the international system; Jäckh’s confidence in the normalizing power of an international system and political responsibility, however, allowed for instrumentalizations by the Nazi regime. Jäckh was at the center of many different strains of internationalism and he both reacted to and shaped these discussions using his connections and his voice as a public intellectual.
National Internationalism in Interwar Germany
Jäckh was part of a network of intellectuals, politicians, and social reformers who came of age under the influence of the pastor and liberal politician Friedrich Naumann, the father of German liberalism. As a pastor and theologian, Naumann had been involved in the charitable organizations of the Evangelical Church since the early 1880s. He had initially become interested in the “social question” through Adolf Stöcker's Evangelical social movement but had grown impatient with the conservatism of the Kaiser's court chaplain. Like most of the social reformers of the period, Naumann believed that Imperial Germany's political institutions had not used all national forces in support of Germany's national as well as international goals. Seeking alternatives to both social democracy and radical nationalism, he emerged as one of Germany's foremost advocates of a liberal imperialism.Footnote 15 In this role, he would become a point of reference for an entire generation of political and social reformers, and he influenced both Jäckh's national internationalism and political tactics.
Naumann's life and his multifaceted activities mirror German intellectual elites’ quest for new frames of references for the analysis of their modernizing society. Industrialization had hardened class identities, hence radicalizing the tension between individual interest and the common good. Consequentially, liberals like Naumann turned to nationalism and leadership ideals as the means to counter the worst effects of class-based society and rationalization of societal relationships, which appeared to be the main by-product of industrialization.Footnote 16 Naumann recognized the power of nationalism in fostering foreign policy goals and developed the notion of a “social Empire,” which was based on the assumption that an inclusive and unified national community would allow its head—the Kaiser in the historical figure of Wilhelm II—to pursue Germany's international and imperialist goals.Footnote 17 Naumann's social nationalism was thus a tool to revive liberalism and coupled international expansion with liberal, domestic reforms.
Naumann's political influence derived from his ability to carve out a sphere of action at the critical point of intersection between official politics and private endeavors.Footnote 18 A friend of Naumann since his student years in Munich at the turn of the century, Jäckh had supported Naumann's political campaigns as editor of the Neckar Zeitung and served as secretary of the German Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen).Footnote 19 Jäckh soon emerged as an able organizer and manager of organizations, who established for himself the role of go-between for various political, intellectual, and institutional networks. Jäckh viewed himself as an educator of the nation (Volkserzieher), positioned at the critical intersection of academia, civil society, and political institutions.Footnote 20 Consequently, while close to the political establishment, he always tried to maintain his political independence in order to preserve his ability to navigate among multiple political circles.
During the First World War, the activities of Naumann and Jäckh overlapped with debates that polarized German society. Beyond specific positions on war aims and domestic reforms, the underlying concern of these debates was how to guarantee Germany's security. The Naumann circle supported the idea of “Central Europe” (Mitteleuropa), which, based on a closer German-Austrian unity, attributed to Germany a central and dominant role in a military as well as economic unity of central European territories.Footnote 21 Naumann and Jäckh established an Arbeitsausschuss für Mitteleuropa (Working Committee for Central Europe) in February 1916 with the goal of supporting the Mitteleuropa idea through propaganda and in collaboration with the Foreign Office.Footnote 22 Like most of the other organizations that sprang up during the war, Naumann's “Working Committee” aimed to seize the opportunities opened by the war, in the form of supporting unification with Austria-Hungary—a territorial unity that should survive the end of the conflict.Footnote 23 While this project soon lost traction with the Foreign Office because it risked alienating Germany's allies in a crucial phase of the conflict,Footnote 24 the concept of a League of Nations emerged between 1915 and 1917 as a potential tool to guarantee Germany's security.Footnote 25 The idea of a League of Nations was popular across Europe, and multiple national organizations were created to promote a League of Nations by the end of 1918.Footnote 26
Jäckh was instrumental in the founding of the Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund (German Society for the League of Nations, hereafter Liga), which combined international aspirations and national goals in its organizational structure. Established on December 17, 1918, it aimed to support the idea of the League of Nations and to foster cooperation among like-minded organizations in Germany and abroad.Footnote 27 Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the Liga developed in relation to official German foreign policy and in reaction against negative public opinion toward the League. As a result, the Liga was at the same time an expression of its liberal founders’ trust in the possibilities of international structures and organizations based on rationality and an unofficial channel for political elites to discuss foreign affairs with European counterparts outside official German foreign policy structures.
The Liga’s close relationship with the Foreign Office determined its structure and composition. Jäckh had secured early on the Foreign Office's endorsement and funding, as well as support from industrialist Robert Bosch, a long-time friend and financial backer of Jäckh's multiple endeavors.Footnote 28 The steering committee included publicists, politicians, and intellectuals and represented the wide spectrum of Weimar's political parties. The popularity in Germany of the idea of a League of Nations emerged in the willingness of pacifist circles, which viewed the League of Nations as a framework for a peaceful world order, to collaborate with the Foreign Office.Footnote 29 The organization aimed to establish within public opinion the virtue of the idea of the League of Nations by reaching out to a broad network of institutional member organizations.Footnote 30 While individual membership reached 2,000 in the early 1920s (but fell back to 1,200 later in the decade), corporate membership (which combined the membership of the Liga’s institutional members) reached around 10 million.Footnote 31 The closeness to the Foreign Office explains the favoring of corporate over mass membership, which could have limited the influence of state agencies.Footnote 32
The shifting of official policies and public opinion toward the League influenced the activities of the Liga. Debates over the League of Nations reached an apex in German public opinion during the months of the peace negotiations in Paris, and the Liga provided a channel for German elites to warn against the dangerous isolation that would come with an exclusion of Germany from a League of Nations.Footnote 33 After the publication of the peace terms in May 1919, the Liga's board of directors initially expressed the hope that the League of Nations would protect Germany, although the board also discussed the possibility that it might develop into a league of the victorious states.Footnote 34 Leadership of the Liga accepted the Treaty of Versailles as a fact, which could only be revised through the legal channels offered by the League of Nations. In the magazine of the Liga, the historian Hans Delbrück argued that by creating the League of Nations, the Treaty of Versailles had provided Germany with the tool to achieve its only possible foreign policy goal, that is, the revision of the treaty.Footnote 35 In the words of Jäckh, Germany's policy toward the League had therefore to aim for a transformation of “the League of Nations of Versailles into a real League of Nations.”Footnote 36 The Liga initially aimed to counter the general lack of knowledge about the Treaty of Versailles by publishing an edited version of the Treaty at a low price.Footnote 37 In addition, it published a series of booklets under the title “The Burden of Peace,” which intended to expose “the monstrosity of the peace.”Footnote 38 Through its network, the Liga supported the Foreign Office in distributing material on the Versailles Treaty and the necessity of its revision.Footnote 39 At the same time, it cooperated with the broad associational network focused on the issue of war guilt in an effort to find domestic support and legitimacy, aware that its links to pacifist circles were problematic at a time when Germans’ attitude toward the League had rapidly moved from enthusiasm to disillusion.Footnote 40
Internationally, the Liga played a complementary role to official German foreign policy. Following the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's exclusion from the League of Nations, the Foreign Office adopted a cautionary approach to membership in the League, only willing to discuss full and equal acceptance into the world order rather than requesting membership.Footnote 41 In this context, the Liga provided Germany an avenue to express its perspectives to the other societies without taking the form of an official policy that would exacerbate domestic political polarization.Footnote 42 It participated in the second Milan conference of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies (IFLNS), where participants heavily debated Germany's attitude toward the League, and was admitted to the IFLNS at the Geneva conference in June 1921.Footnote 43 While its activities decreased in this period, the Liga continued to advocate for membership in the League, which it argued would help protect German interests.Footnote 44
After 1921, the role of the Liga declined. Government subsidies notably decreased to a quarter of pre-1921 levels and, searching for a space in Germany's crowded public sphere, it moved from ineffectual campaigns for German admission into the League to advocacy for German minorities living abroad.Footnote 45 In spite of a moderate upswing in activities in the mid-1920s following the stabilization of international relations and Germany's admission into the League of Nations, the IFLNS's Special Propaganda Campaign secretaries failed to revive the activities of the Liga in the 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote 46 Nominally independent, the organization had developed in close partnership with the government, in line with Jäckh's typical approach. This close collaboration points to the interest of German civil and political elites in international and transnational organizations to pursue foreign policy objectives. It also foreshadows a trend toward state officials and political elites of many international organizations in interwar Germany being eager to leverage transnational connections and networks of private actors. This intermingling of national goals and internationalism, as well as closeness between public and private actors, became Jäckh's common operational approach.
Interwar internationalism was not limited to building its institutional structures. Individual and organizational actors moved beyond the League and its associated societies and engaged in a broad set of activities ranging from transnational intellectual cooperation to global governance.Footnote 47 The intellectuals who were part of these networks were aware that a new and peaceful world order required a change in attitudes.Footnote 48 Jäckh's activities in the 1920s follow this trajectory. His involvement with the German Liga focused on the building and supporting of an international system that could guarantee the peaceful resolution of international disputes and thus provide Germany with a tool to revise the Treaty of Versailles and join the international community as a peer. At the same time, he and many of the intellectuals and politicians involved in the Liga were at the center of efforts that traced back to the prewar period, which aimed to educate Germans about politics and create a professional cadre of foreign office professionals. These efforts overlapped with and benefited from the political patronage of Carl H. Becker.
Becker became a key figure in the development of educational policies in Germany during the 1920s. Becker's interest in international relations developed during the war when, after joining Prussia's Ministry of Culture, he worked on integrating courses on international relations into the curricula of Prussian universities and noted the limited understanding of foreign affairs among Germans in the memorandum, “On the Improvement of Foreign Affairs.”Footnote 49 Later, Becker directed Prussia's Ministry of Education for some months in 1921 and from February 1925 to January 1930. Against the backdrop of Germany's political and economic collapse, he argued that, “Unconcerned by the praise and criticism of other countries, out of ourselves we must create in the cultural areas the new spiritual Germany.”Footnote 50 To this end, Becker envisioned a new cultural and educational policy that aimed to create a cultural consciousness that could be shared across political factions in a period in which party politics seemed to fragment national unity.Footnote 51
Against the background of Germany's growing international isolation, German elites turned toward culture and science in an effort to regain in the field of knowledge what had been lost militarily. Jäckh viewed political education as necessary for the rebirth of Germany's honor and development and, conversely, its lack as the main cause of the lost war. Surprisingly, considering the postwar animosity between Germany and France, a common theme during the founding ceremony of the DHfP was the reference to the French École libre des sciences politiques (Free College for Political Science, hereafter Ècole libre), considered a model for the new German institute. These references were not a complete novelty as German intellectuals had used the French Ècole libre to denounce German leadership's lack of political expertise and had argued, after the war, that the École libre trained those French political leaders who had guided France to a victorious war.Footnote 52 The École libre allowed Jäckh to establish a connection between the DHfP and the resurrection of Prussia after the Napoleonic wars. In fact, he argued that the French Ècole libre had been modeled after the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (founded in 1810), which had served the reconstruction of Prussia after its defeat in the Napoleonic wars. Just as the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität had done for Prussia, the Ècole libre had helped France's reconstruction after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and contributed to its victory in the World War.Footnote 53
Jäckh contrasted, however, his school's internationalism to the “revenge chauvinism” of the Ècole libre. The DHfP would aim “for the intellectual and spiritual reconstruction of Germany—of a new Germany and through it also of a new Europe in a new spirit (though not the senseless, violent ‘spirit’ of Versailles), so that the dead of this war have not been sacrificed in vain.”Footnote 54 The ability to attract foreign students and, in particular, the fact that several foreign governments started sending civil servants for training to the DHfP rather than to the Ècole libre as they had done in the past, confirmed this internationalist outlook.Footnote 55 The DHfP embodied the hopes of German liberals in the aftermath of the war and exemplified their approach to nationalism and internationalism. In the postwar context, the debates on Germany's role in world affairs necessarily influenced the school's establishment. In a memorandum on the founding of the DHfP, Theodor Heuss argued that Germany's former war enemies continued to pursue Germany's destruction in times of peace and thus the new school was crucial in rebuilding the German state.Footnote 56
Over the course of the 1920s, the DHfP played important role in the political life of the Weimar Republic. Strategically positioned at the critical intersection of academia and politics, the School of Politics stressed vocational training for political practitioners. Emphasizing objective, scientific political discourse over a political rhetoric dominated by ideology and rivaling extremisms, the DHfP aimed to build a politics of civility in Weimar's contentious political sphere.Footnote 57 In these years, the curriculum prioritized domestic policy over foreign politics.Footnote 58 With Weimar's apparent political and economic stabilization in the mid-1920s, Jäckh and the School of Politics increasingly focused on Germany's role in the international arena by establishing connections with European and American cultural and scientific institutions.Footnote 59 At this historical juncture, Jäckh provided a vantage point on an internationalism that emphasized cross-national connections and entanglements while prioritizing Germany's interests.
Ernst Jäckh and the Ideology of the “New Germany”
In the second half of the 1920s, Jäckh emerged as the spokesperson of a new form of internationalism and an advocate for the “New Germany.” Jäckh carefully built for himself the role of “civil diplomat,” aiming to be “a trait d'union for contrasting interests, for the balancing of different mentalities, and for the mediation between various perspectives.”Footnote 60 The Liga and the DHfP, with their dual focus on establishing internationalism’s structures and mentality, aimed to revise the Treaty of Versailles through the avenues provided by the League of Nations. In the second part of the decade, while his egotistical personality led him to claim a central role in the Treaty of Locarno, Jäckh relentlessly pursued the goal of accommodating his nationalist aims within a growing international connectedness.Footnote 61 He established connections and partnerships with European research and educational centers and cultivated his connections with US philanthropic foundations.Footnote 62 In so doing, he successfully moved the DHfP to the center of a transnational philanthropic network through which US philanthropies aimed to promote regional integration, international processes, and democracy.Footnote 63
The emphasis on a new, democratic Germany was a centerpiece of the new internationalism of German political elites. The “New Germany” rhetoric served political elites in establishing a clear distinction between Weimar democratic institutions and the old, allegedly militaristic Germany. In his writings, Jäckh drew on the efforts of both old Wilhelmine liberals like Ernst Troeltsch and a younger generation of liberals like Heuss to identify a German democratic tradition, and so to legitimize Weimar's democratic institutions.Footnote 64 The New Germany was in reality the old Germany of the revolution of 1848, whose spirit, while defeated by Prussian militarism and monarchy, had not been killed.Footnote 65 He argued that Weimar's democratic institutions had survived initial political, economic, and financial challenges and were now supported by the majority of people and parties.Footnote 66 The activities of the DHfP in the early 1920s were part of this process since it was founded on the belief that “the rational control over both emotional and instinctive impulses, as well a scientific approach to human affairs was needed to improve world politics.”Footnote 67 Jäckh viewed increased participation in politics and the political trajectories of Gustav Stresemann and Paul von Hindenburg, who, after initial skepticism, had started working within democratic institutions, as a sign of Germans’ political education and the normalizing force of political responsibility.Footnote 68
Jäckh related the transformation of Germany and of international relations to the “Spirit of Locarno.” The Locarno Treaties (October 1925) normalized international relations with Germany and guaranteed postwar western borders, and their ratification in Geneva in September 1926 opened the door to Germany's membership in the League of Nations. Jäckh praised the international spirit of Locarno and Geneva as necessary to break Germany's isolation and, at the same time, viewed it as the outcome of international interconnections once again centered on Germany.Footnote 69 In the immediate aftermath of the war, the League of Nations had been closely connected to the system of Versailles, which represented an old-world order.Footnote 70 However, the Treaty of Locarno—he argued—had allowed a New Germany to emerge, which he not only rooted in the national democratic tradition of the Forty Eighters but also in the internationalism of US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.Footnote 71 As they had temporarily done in the immediate postwar period, Jäckh and his associates believed that membership in the League of Nations and the Locarno Treaties would pave the path to a new German foreign policy. Germany's political elites viewed international treaties and the League of Nations as tools for revising the provisions that limited German sovereignty.Footnote 72
The new Germany not only emerged from the idealism of 1848 but also geographical, political, and economic factors. Jäckh pointed to Germany's peculiar geopolitical position in Europe, which contributed to its political and diplomatic isolation.Footnote 73 Nonetheless, he argued, Germany was connected to the international community through its population and economy. Germany was integrated within Europe's economic system because of its central role in continental commercial routes.Footnote 74 In addition, numerous large German communities were living in other European countries, hence connecting Germany to its neighboring states.Footnote 75 It was Germany's task, and the task of its politicians, to unify the German people and rebuild the country's power through the League of Nations.Footnote 76 Jäckh viewed Germany as “the symbol not only of a German destiny of her own, but also of a joint European destiny.”Footnote 77 Germany's entanglement with Europe through population and economy therefore connected Germany's future and Europe's fate.
His confidence renewed by the Weimar Republic's stabilization and Germany's progressive reintegration within the international community, Jäckh celebrated the New Germany within a broader, internationalist framework. Identifying Germany as a central node in an interconnected Europe allowed Jäckh to link the stability of the world to the inclusion of all its vital nodes, including Germany. He considered the reintegration of this new, democratic Germany into the international order a necessity to guarantee peace because of Germany's geographical position in the heart of Europe and its interconnectedness with its neighbors through commerce and population. Furthermore, based on his observations of Stresemann and Hindenburg, he believed that participation in this democratic and interconnected system resulted in greater political responsibility of leaders and political parties.
At the same time, international connections provided Jäckh with important leverage in the national arena. Jäckh had traditionally relied on the financial support of state agencies and the private support of Bosch in all his organizational endeavors. This dual approach had allowed him to maintain a closeness to political elites while preserving his political independence. This position allowed him to carve out an important role at the intersection of public policies and private initiatives, but that role depended on his ability to resist the coopting and financial power of state agencies. In this context, US philanthropy provided Jäckh with important freedom of maneuver when private support for the DHfP started declining.Footnote 78 While US philanthropic support permitted Jäckh to avoid complete dependence on state funds and thus loss of his political independence, he was well aware of the role of philanthropic foundations in US cultural diplomacy. In fact, in Becker's view, foundations were “the most important tool of power in government's diplomatic struggle for decisive cultural influence.”Footnote 79 Jäckh's understanding of the roles and aims of international organizations allowed him to take advantage of transatlantic philanthropic transfers without being relegated to the passive role of recipient.Footnote 80
Jäckh's internationalism and his role in cross-national philanthropic networks was not, however, completely independent from official foreign policy. Jäckh was traditionally aligned with political elites and state officials manifested a clear interest in the activities of the DHfP for its entire existence. Not surprisingly, Becker repeatedly emphasized the centrality of transnational scientific networks and cultural policy in the broader cultural diplomacy and foreign policy of the New Germany.Footnote 81 In this context, German government officials repeatedly attempted to manipulate philanthropic networks for the benefit of Germany's foreign policy objectives.Footnote 82 Tensions between official politics and private action had emerged in Jäckh's other endeavors; in particular, the Liga had always followed the Foreign Office's cautionary approach regarding the League of Nations. Arguably, the Stresemann Memorial Foundation is the organization where these tensions fully emerged.
The Stresemann Memorial Foundation and its Peace Academy were established to honor Stresemann after his sudden death in October 1929. The foundation honored the memory of Stresemann because of the effort to pursue the ideal of a just political order rooted in national interest and international solidarity.Footnote 83 As chancellor and foreign minister, Stresemann's energetic leadership had broken Germany's isolation and facilitated its reintegration into the international community, hence personifying—in Jäckh's words—the new Germany because Stresemann had “evolved from his old opportunism, under the experience of responsibility, to a new conception of Germany’s part in world politics.”Footnote 84 Jäckh spearheaded the establishment of the Stresemann Memorial Foundation and the Peace Academy, which were devoted to the scientific study of international relations, and was successful in securing the support of his transatlantic philanthropic partners, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and the Rockefeller Foundation.Footnote 85 German political elites expressed immediate interest in this new endeavor and the involvement of Julius Curtius, Germany's minister of foreign affairs, signaled government officials’ attempt to take advantage of this transnational network.Footnote 86
Interestingly, however, government involvement was not limited to Curtius's role and was not unequivocal, as various ministries attempted to influence the new organization. In November 1930, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning congratulated Jäckh for his success in establishing the Stresemann Foundation,Footnote 87 which led to a phone meeting between Jäckh and Hermann Pünder (state secretary in the Reich Chancellery) to discuss the “political development” of the Peace Academy.Footnote 88 By the end of the year, Jäckh reported that both the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Office had declared their agreement with the by-laws of his new organizations.Footnote 89 A year later, however, Reich Interior Minister Joseph Wirth protested against the exclusion of his ministry from the activities of the Stresemann Foundation and threatened repercussions for the DHfP.Footnote 90 According to Jäckh's account, Wirth was dissatisfied with the exclusion of political figures from the activities of the Stresemann Foundation. In a letter to Wirth, Jäckh stressed that the Rockefeller Foundation had explicitly requested the exclusion of politicians and would withdraw support in case of a politicization of the school through the involvement of political figures.Footnote 91 This particular interaction exemplified the experience of many of these private, nonstate actors, whose interaction with the state was characterized by a fluctuation between tacit coercion and voluntary cooperation.
National Internationalism in a Transnational Arena
Jäckh's international role grew more ambiguous in the 1930s as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between his roles as a private individual and representative of Germany. During the last years of the republic, Jäckh became an unofficial envoy for the republican government and presented himself as the public advocate of the “New Germany.” His loyalty toward the German state led to a closer alignment with political elites, with whom he discussed his foreign travels and speeches.Footnote 92 In speeches, interviews, and reports, Jäckh justified the authoritarian turn of Germany's political system under the governments of Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Papen as necessary to contain the more radical forces that had emerged with the electoral gains of both the Nazi and Communist parties since the September 1930 elections.Footnote 93 In fact, Jäckh argued that Brüning's authoritarianism was grounded in the constitution and based on the consent of the people, and the von Papen government was “conservative” in the sense of “a government aiming at conserving, consolidating, fortifying the existing state, the republic.”Footnote 94 Jäckh’s positive analyses of German political events reassured his American audience of the stability of German democracy.Footnote 95 As founder and president of the German School of Politics, which the Anglo-American world regarded as one of Germany’s few truly democratic institutions, Jäckh was a respected commentator on German affairs. He was also an unofficial representative of US philanthropic foundations in Germany.Footnote 96
The Nazi seizure of power did not substantially alter Jäckh's approach, and he presented himself to the new regime as an indispensable asset for Germany's cultural diplomacy. He boasted about his contacts in Great Britain and his propaganda successes in the United States,Footnote 97 and pointed to his efforts to “produce understanding for the new Germany” abroad.Footnote 98 In a letter to Hans H. Lammers (state secretary and chief of the Reich Chancellery under Hitler) he stated, “independent of whether this Germany is called a first, second, or third, I am decided to serve our common Fatherland and the German nation.”Footnote 99 Although this comment cannot be disentangled from Jäckh's attempts to secure his position in Germany, it stresses a peculiar mentality that made it difficult to take a route of radical opposition to the state. In fact, since World War One, the influence of Germany's public intellectuals was based on their ability to place themselves at the critical intersection between private and public initiatives.
In this new political context, Jäckh trusted the capacity of political institutions to neutralize oppositional political forces by forcing them to take political responsibility. Speaking at London's Chatham House on February 6, 1933, he explained that the Hitler-Papen government had forced Hitler to assume political responsibility, as had been done in the past with Gustav Stresemann and the SPD.Footnote 100 At the same time, he tried to narrow the distance between his political position and National Socialism. In a private letter to the Führer, Jäckh found in the primacy of politics a common ground with Nazi ideology.Footnote 101 Furthermore, he stressed that the DHfP had trained Nazis, and counted well-known Nazi leaders among its faculty, and represented a bridge between the national socialism of Friedrich Naumann and Hitler's.Footnote 102 Shortly after, Jäckh was among a group of liberal-oriented Germans who, on the pages of the Berliner Tageblatt, stressed the necessity to “work together” with the “new state.”Footnote 103 Jäckh’s search for a compromise with the Nazi regime exemplifies an acquiescence bordering on accommodation among German liberals, who had become accustomed to extra-parliamentary rule since the Brüning governments, and who were influenced by Naumann’s national social views, which allowed them to find continuity with Hitler’s National Socialism.Footnote 104
These efforts notwithstanding, Jäckh failed to secure the independence of the DHfP and the Stresemann Foundation, and his negotiations with Nazi leaders were unsuccessful. As part of Gleichschaltung, or the “policy of coordination,” the new regime purged organizational life at all levels of politically and racially nonreliable members. In May, the school ceased to exist as an independent organization and was moved under the control of the Ministry of Propaganda: five of the sixteen full-time faculty members continued to teach in the “coordinated” school, and Jäckh was in charge of liquidating the remaining costs of the old DHfP.Footnote 105 Jäckh also resigned his leadership position in the Stresemann Memorial Foundation.Footnote 106 Curtius discussed the restructuring of the Stresemann Foundation with the new Nazi state, which focused on transforming the foundation into an “Institute for foreign relations,” one that would continue its activities under a different name.Footnote 107 Eventually, in February 1940, the Prussian state ministry decided to liquidate the organization.Footnote 108
After failing to guarantee the independence of his Berlin endeavors, Jäckh sought refuge in London in 1933, though he regularly traveled to Germany, where he maintained personal contacts with the new regime and participated in Nazi gatherings.Footnote 109 In England, he closely collaborated with Lord David Davies, who in 1932 had founded the New Commonwealth Society (NCS) to pursue the establishment of an international tribunal and the creation of an international police force.Footnote 110 Inspired by the new sense of urgency created by the rapid development of new weapons of aggression and the stalemate emerging from the Geneva international disarmament conference, the NCS was a truly transnational organization with groups and branches active in multiple countries.Footnote 111 Jäckh served as vice president of the NCS and director of its research arm, the New Commonwealth Research Institute (NCRI), which investigated international issues by working with an international network of personalities.Footnote 112 In this role, Jäckh viewed internationalism as a tool to reinsert Germany into the international community and, in doing so, force the Nazi leadership to take political responsibility in the international arena.Footnote 113 The NCS provided Jäckh with a venue to continue his efforts in support of international and supranational organizations, which he had begun more than ten year earlier as a founding member of the Liga.
Jäckh's efforts to reaffirm an intrinsic European interconnectedness along the line of his “New Germany” propaganda developed in a highly ambiguous sphere, as his liberal internationalism intersected with the internationalist strategies of the Nazi regime. In fact, while the NCS had a clear liberal, internationalist orientation, its German branch (New Commonwealth deutsches Studienkomitee, NCdSK) was close to the Nazi Party. Colonel Friedrich Haselmayr (a Nazi politician and SA leader) had established it in 1932 with the help of Jäckh and the financial support of the industrialist Robert Bosch.Footnote 114 The German branch operated freely in Nazi Germany, and listed more than 1,500 subscribers to its publications. These included translations of foreign texts and original contributions by the NCdSK’s German members to which no significant changes were made. The organization’s members traveled to England and NCS’s international conferences.Footnote 115 In this context, Rockefeller Foundation officers reported on Jäckh's peculiar position in Germany, where he was a “reasonably persona grata in German government circles.”Footnote 116 The fact that the NCS leadership believed that the organization could mediate between liberalism and National Socialism points to, on the one hand, the attempt to influence the Nazi regime’s policies and, on the other hand, the ability of the Nazi regime to absorb multiple ideas under its ideological umbrella.Footnote 117
The activities of the German branch of the NCS and Jäckh's ambiguous role need to be seen in the context of the growing interest in the internationalism of fascist states. Scholars have shown how fascist states took advantage of the vulnerability of international networks and successfully infiltrated and instrumentalized the transnational actors of interwar liberal internationalism.Footnote 118 Jäckh appears to play such a role, although perhaps unconsciously, during the First New Commonwealth International Conference in Pontigny (France) in the summer of 1937. In the opening addresses, speakers drew a contrast between the emphasis on individual rights in democratic societies and the all-powerful state in totalitarian systems, whereas Jäckh again stressed the interconnectedness of a post-World War One world.Footnote 119 The German delegate Ottmar Bühler reported on the general interest for the German delegation, which was the only delegation from an “authoritarian state.” He noted, however, Jäckh's role in limiting debates on Germany's political system.Footnote 120 This dynamic is not surprising since participation in international congresses had become, for Nazi officials, a way to preempt criticism of Nazi Germany at those events.Footnote 121
The tension between the nationalist goals of the German committee and the internationalist aims of the NCS eventually led to the liquidation of the German committee. The New Commonwealth Monthly celebrated the speech of its new president Winston Churchill,Footnote 122 who in the eyes of the German committee personified the society's anti-German turn.Footnote 123 In the following months, Admiral Albrecht von Freyberg, who had replaced Haselmayr at the head of the German committee, and Lord Davies discussed the broader goals of the New Commonwealth movement, German interests, and the nomination of Churchill and Wickham Steed to high-ranking positions in the British NCS.Footnote 124 The German secret police, which had always monitored the activities and correspondence of the German branch and occasionally questioned its intentions, now followed these events closely,Footnote 125 and Jäckh's meetings with von Neurath, Schacht, and Lammers became reason for concern.Footnote 126 A report described Jäckh as a “highly murky personality” who was “married to a Jew” and thus “certainly unqualified to defend German interests abroad.”Footnote 127 The leadership changes in the British NCS signaled the end of earlier attempts to find a common ground with the new Nazi state. The British exit undermined the Nazis' internationalist strategies, which had aimed to support Germany abroad. This support had been the main rationale for the Nazi regime's participation in the international network of NCS in the first place.
The goal of National Socialist internationalism had always been to influence international and transnational organizations for Nazi purposes. The German committee had aimed to “clearly state Germany's viewpoint on all international problems,”Footnote 128 but the nomination of Churchill as head of the British Society made all forms of collaboration impossible and thus the German committee ended its activities on June 30, 1938.Footnote 129 While the NCS increasingly voiced a “militant internationalist opinion” advocating for example for an international police force, this militant internationalism became for some proponents an expedient to promote a collective defense of national interests.Footnote 130 Admiral von Freyberg explained the disbanding of the German branch as the result of the exploitation of the NCS by British politicians.Footnote 131 In line with the position of the German branch, Jäckh severed his relationship with the New Commonwealth over Lord Davies's use of the society to advocate against the appeasement policy of the British government in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement.Footnote 132 Arguing that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had no alternative during the September crisis of 1938,Footnote 133 Jäckh relinquished his position of director of the international section of the New Commonwealth, as well as of the New Commonwealth Institute.Footnote 134
The New Commonwealth Institute had embodied Jäckh's approach as well as his ambiguities. The efforts to integrate the Nazi branch into the NCS were initially successful because a series of catchwords—freedom, equity, power, and emergency—provided apparent common ground for German and non-German members, although these concepts had radically different meanings for each party.Footnote 135 This search for a common ground resembled Jäckh's earlier efforts to find a way to work with the Nazi regime within a conceptual framework that allowed the integration of contradictory if not mutually exclusive ideologies. Jäckh used the institute and his international connections to break Germany's isolation in the hope that the Nazi regime could be normalized. His hopes met an abrupt end with the British branch of NCS's change in approach, which also led to the closure of the German section of the NCS. By then, however, he was no longer a persona grata in Germany and, at the same time, his willingness to negotiate and readiness to compromise with the Nazi regime had tainted his international standing.
Jäckh continued his activities in exile with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. In his typical manner, Jäckh tried to insert himself at the intersection of government policies and academic endeavors. He received a one-year grant of $6,000 to study problems of regional federalism in Europe at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies.Footnote 136 With the outbreak of World War II, however, he postponed these plans and organized the South-Eastern European section of the Ministry of Information for the British government.Footnote 137 Inevitably, however, Jäckh's intermingling of research and politics created tensions within the Geneva Institute and with the Rockefeller Foundation.Footnote 138 While the renewal of his grant was discussed,Footnote 139 the expansion of the war forced Jäckh to flee to the United States via Portugal.Footnote 140
Jäckh moved to the United States where he became visiting research professor at Columbia University. Here, both the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace contributed to his stipend.Footnote 141 Rockefeller Foundation officers considered financial support a moral responsibility since Jäckh had represented the foundation in Berlin.Footnote 142 Nonetheless, Joseph H. Willits, the director of the division of social sciences, described Jäckh as “long a protégé and almost equally long a concern to the RF.”Footnote 143 In 1944, although expressing his willingness to contribute to his stipend for the third year in a row, Willits pointedly noted, “I see no point to our increasing the amount on the fiction that he will write another book. I don't think his book warrants support by us, but perhaps certain pension protection is justified.”Footnote 144 Officers were clear about the nature of the relationship with Jäckh whose “talents lie more in the field of educational administration and public affairs than in scholarship in the narrower sense.”Footnote 145
As a “go-between,” Jäckh personified the international connections of Germany's elites. In the second half of the 1920s, he had become the unofficial representative of the Rockefeller Foundation in Berlin and after the Nazi seizure of power, he hoped to serve “as a middle-man between the foundation and isolated scholars in Germany working in the field of international relations.”Footnote 146 Although he always renounced an official political role, he cultivated relationships with political elites and constructed for himself an in-between role at the intersection of a broad network of intellectuals, philanthropists, and political elites. He aimed to normalize the Nazi regime by involving high-ranking officials of the new regime in transnational societies such as the New Commonwealth movement. However, eventually—as Rockefeller Foundation officers noted—Jäckh almost became an unofficial spokesperson for the regime abroad.
Conclusions
In this study, Jäckh's career helps us better understand interwar internationalism, and hence certain limits of transnational or global civil society. The focus on the individual level of analysis highlights the connections between internationalism in theory and praxis, since intellectual history is fruitful only when it points to the areas where the work of the abstract theorist overlaps with practical experimentations.Footnote 147 Additionally, moving the analytical focus between the various levels allows this study to emphasize the role of individual actors and agency by focusing on the nodes between the “honeycombs” of transnational spaces.Footnote 148 These shifting levels of analysis also allow one to investigate the complex coexistence of national allegiances and identities with transnational projects and processes.Footnote 149 The example of Jäckh and the organizations he established shows how transnational civil society and internationalism were used to support nationalist goals and how such goals undermined the roots of transnational civil society in the years leading to the Second World War.
Jäckh has not received much attention in spite of his central role in multiple historical developments in interwar Europe. Firstly, as the damning assessment of a program officer of the Rockefeller Foundation suggested, Jäckh was not an original scholar and academically lived in the shadows of giants like Max Weber, Friedrich Meinecke, and Hans Delbrück, to name a few. However, his role as go-between makes him even more relevant in light of the recent attention within international history to institutions and individuals as key nodes in transnational connections and flows. Further, the lack of attention paid to Jäckh may have resulted from the fact that the DHfP, Jäckh's main endeavor in the 1920s, and the controversies surrounding it, have overshadowed all his other activities.
From an historical perspective, this essay points to the potentials and limits of global civil society by investigating the complex interactions of local and international actors. It provides a more nuanced understanding of the development of asymmetries between local priorities and the goals, as well as strategies, of global actors. First, the cases of the Stresemann Foundation and the NCS highlight the critical intersection between transnational and local spheres of action. In examining these cases, the essay has contributed to the larger debate over the role of transnational organizations in facing the challenges of an increasingly complex global community. Second, these historical case studies stress the tensions and difficulties arising from attempts to mediate between competing cultural and political priorities and interests. Lastly, the emphasis on education and research of both the Stresemann Memorial Foundation and the New Commonwealth Institute points to the ambivalent role of cooperative educational programs, as evidenced by the recent debates over the decision of prestigious US universities to establish campuses in more or less authoritarian states.
